Roommate of key witness testifies at doctor's opioid trafficking trial
The Canadian Press | Posted: April 12, 2017 12:24 PM | Last Updated: April 12, 2017
Dr. Sarah Jones has pleaded not guilty to possession of narcotics for the purpose of trafficking
Dr. Sarah Dawn Jones brought a patient roughly 30 oxycodone pills a month, even as records show thousands of pills were prescribed in his name, the man's roommate told the Nova Scotia doctor's drug-trafficking trial Wednesday.
Norma Wentzell gasped Wednesday when Crown lawyer Josh Bryson read from a patient expense report that showed 2,000 OxyNeo pills were prescribed to Merle Chase in one month during the 18-month time frame of the alleged offences.
Chase lived with Wentzell in Bridgewater, and she said Jones would make house calls in 2014 and 2015 to bring him his prescriptions.
"Oh my gosh, no," said Wentzell, 64, on the stand after being asked if Chase ever received 2,000 oxycodone pills in a single month.
Cross-examination
Wentzell said Jones would come to the home roughly every two weeks in 2014, but didn't come as often in 2015.
Under cross-examination, defence lawyer Stan MacDonald appeared to point to contradictions in Wentzell's testimony.
He showed the former retail worker a statement she gave to police in February 2016 in which she said Jones "went wild" in 2015 and was coming to the house "a lot."
The CBC's Elizabeth Chiu live blogged from provincial court in Bridgewater.
Chase testified Tuesday that he did not receive the bulk of the prescriptions for OxyNeo, even though the patient expense report showed they were prescribed to him.
But Chase was not consistent in his testimony about how many OxyNeo prescriptions he actually received from Jones, how many pills he took and the last time he took them.
The Crown alleges Jones wrote prescriptions for 46,000 oxycodone and OxyNeo pills to a patient, but the drugs were diverted to the community.
Jones has pleaded not guilty to possession of narcotics for the purpose of trafficking, drawing a document without authority, and fraud.
Last week, the judge in the case ruled that information provided to a medical regulator would be excluded from the trial.
The defence had argued a letter and interview Jones provided to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in September 2015 were provided under compulsion.